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is a laboratory and office, eighteen by twenty-three feet, for the 

 use of the professor in charge of the department. A small room 

 adjoining the laboratory is used by the assistant in charge of 

 laboratory work. The arrangement of these rooms, the three 

 entrance vestibules and the stairways leading to the floor above, 

 are shown in the accompanying diagram, plate X. 



At the east of the laboratory and connecting directly with it are 

 the plant houses, built in 1881 by Messrs. Lord and Burnham, of 

 Irvington. These are a special gift of Mr. Sage. They consist 

 of five houses, forming together a structure forty-five by one 

 hundred and forty-five feet in its extreme dimensions. The rela- 

 tive position and sizes of these houses is shown in the accompany- 

 ing plan, plate XI. They are of different height, ranging from 

 ten to twenty feet, the central and highest one being known as the 

 Palm House. All are arranged for different degrees of tempera- 

 ture, so that a wide range of conditions adapted to a correspond- 

 ingly wide range of plants is afforded. The houses are well 

 stocked with a large collection of plants, chosen mainly for their 

 use in botanical instruction and investigation. Underneath the 

 laboratory are the potting room and boiler room, the houses being 

 heated by hot water. The houses are built in every respect in the 

 most thorough manner, and experience has shown that their work- 

 ing quality is almost perfect. 



On the floor above the main laboratory is the upper laboratory, 

 twenty-two by thirty-three feet, lighted on three sides, and origin- 

 ally intended mainly for introductory laboratory work. Adjoin- 

 ing this and connected with it by a broad, open archway, is the 

 botanical museum, twenty -eight by forty-six feet. Here are kept 

 the general herbarium and the collection of vegetable products, 

 all arranged in suitable cases in systematic order, corresponding 

 to the systematic arrangement of the natural orders of plants. 

 On the floor above the museum, the third floor of the buildine 

 are the drying and pressing rooms, the apparatus rooms and the 

 room for the duplicate herbarium specimens, of which the depart- 

 ment owns many thousands. 



The collection consists of the general herbarium, containing at 

 least fifteen thousand species and a much larger number of speci- 

 mens, the local herbarium containing specimens of all the species 

 of flowering plants and ferns growing spontaneously in the 



